Solutions for all the kids crossing the line

Sympathy can be misguided. Kindness can be misplaced. Often these emotions are immediate and not thought through. About 85 years ago, during and after the Depression, the federal government let these emotions create laws and programs to try to prevent future recessions. They all failed. Recently we tried the same tactics (stimulus), and again they failed. So we learned artificial stimuli will not replace knowledge of economics and programs that create job growth.

Sympathy can be misguided. Kindness can be misplaced. Often these emotions are immediate and not thought through. About 85 years ago, during and after the Depression, the federal government let these emotions create laws and programs to try to prevent future recessions. They all failed. Recently we tried the same tactics (stimulus), and again they failed. So we learned artificial stimuli will not replace knowledge of economics and programs that create job growth.

Today we see an administration taking a new tack. Instead of working bilaterally to make immigration a plus and planning an orderly way to get the best of the unregistered identified, documented and employed (or sent back if deemed “undesirable”), one tactic is to cloud the duties at the border for our agents. Another tactic is to dredge up from decades ago an attempt to give political asylum to Central and South Americans to escape the “death squads.” So we announce on TV in South and Central America, “if you can get to the American border, you can stay.”

So if your empathy is overriding your brain, call up your congressman and offer to take in, feed and clothe one of the unfortunates at the border. Or send a check.

Doug Farrow, Modesto

Our nation shows compassion

Regarding the letter “Bee bullies readers on border issue” (July 9), which called the immigrant children at our borders “criminals”: I wonder if the writer ever thought about his immigrant origins, when and how his ancestors came here. Perhaps they were fleeing a dictatorship and poverty on their homelands and finding the United States a haven that gave them an opportunity to start a new beginning, finding prosperity and, most of all, liberty. Our country is characterized for being compassionate and will always be. That’s why you are here.

Ernesto R. Gomez, Modesto

Send the kids to Washington

Take the illegals to Washington, D.C., and set up tents and porta-potties on the White House grounds, also on the Capitol grounds. This might get both sides and the president to come together and secure the border. If they had to see them each day, they would soon realize what a problem our unsecured border is causing. I know this will never happen – just a thought.